Last week, ICE raids sparked protests in Los Angeles. Dozens of people were arrested, and increasingly confrontational demonstrations spread across the city.

By Sunday, the protests had devolved into riots. Bricks and scooters were hurled at police officers who were trapped beneath an overpass near City Hall; gas stations were looted; and Waymos — at least five of them — were set ablaze downtown.

Images of people standing on top of the burning cars, some waving Mexican flags, quickly went viral. They kicked off a fierce debate: why were Waymos targeted, and what exactly was the targeting supposed to mean?

The answer depends, at least in part, on a very familiar problem for Waymo, one it’s faced since the very beginning: perception.

In self-driving car speak, “perception” is about how the car understands the world. And for a long time, self-driving car companies couldn’t hack it. A mix of cameras and AI models weren’t sufficient to tell the difference between a shadow and an object. Many autonomous vehicle (AV) projects shuttered thanks to this specific perception challenge, among them Uber’s, which, in 2018, struck a pedestrian when the car misclassified the woman as “an unknown object” while its safety driver wasn’t paying attention.

But a stack of engineering advances (synthetic training data, NVIDIA chips, fancier sensors) led to breakthroughs in AV technology, and by the end of 2021, California began to issue permits for the AV fleets of SF-based Cruise and Waymo, allowing them to operate without safety drivers onboard. Despite a trivial number of negative incidents (especially compared to human drivers), activists, city officials, and agencies nonetheless tried to obstruct their expansion at every turn. The anti-AV camp’s message was roughly: these growth-at-all-costs Silicon Valley firms are going to literally kill us. Waymos were supposedly a danger to SF residents, though how much the narrative was influenced by organized labor like the SF Taxi Workers Alliance, for whom the Waymos meant, you know, joblessness, remains an open question.

As it turned out, the industry’s perception challenges were just getting started. The car understood the world, but the world didn’t understand the car. Even in tech-forward SF.

“As ever, California is just our nation’s prologue,” as Pirate Wires’ Mike Solana (yes, we’re quoting ourselves now, sorry) predicted at the time. “The introduction of working, autonomous vehicles to American streets is about to catalyze a ferocious, partisan war.”

WEIRD BUT COOL

Cruise shuttered in 2024, but Waymo steadily expanded. As of mid‑2025, the company is operational in Phoenix, SF, LA, Palo Alto, Austin, and Miami. Waymo’s fleet has given more than 10 million paid rides, and has begun to surpass Uber drivers on trips per day. For Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, it was a story of “exponential scaling,” he said at a 2024 Google developer conference. For the public — at least the public on social media — Waymo meant a surreal tourist attraction in a dystopian or utopian world, depending on their particular wiring. There was fear — and Schadenfreude, when the cars got stuck or did something stupid — but mostly, Waymo meant delight, humor, and anthropomorphism. Weird but cool, if you will.

“Y’all, this is my ride right here!” one lady said in a viral TikTok, laughing: “Y’all, this is so weird.”

“That Waymo came through!” someone said in another post, as Waymos slowly, cautiously navigated around an Amazon delivery van on a narrow street. “Wahoo!”

Waymo was shaping up to be an unambiguous success story in a field once thought impossible.

Until earlier this year.

In a story titled “How Waymo became a symbol of everything people hate about AI,” Fast Company talked about Waymo getting burned, literally, in the AI backlash.

Back in February 2024, as a Waymo safely made its way through a crowd celebrating the Lunar New Year in SF’s Chinatown, people smashed its windows, covered it in graffiti, and eventually threw a firework inside that burned it to ashes. A “human-versus-machine” moment, the Fast Company reporter posited. At the time, San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin responded to the incident by calling for more restrictions on the Waymo fleet, even as he acknowledged that “a bunch of hoodlums” might’ve carried out the mischief just for the hell of it.

“Most normal car drivers know that they have to avoid Chinatown during the Lunar New Year holidays,” Peskin said. “The computer doesn’t understand that.”

Waymo treated the incident like an “unfortunate one-off,” per Fast Company.

As the events of the last week have shown, it’s no longer, strictly speaking, a one-off.

‘ABOLISH WAYMO. ABOLISH ICE.’

On Sunday, when rioters in LA destroyed five Waymos by lighting them on fire, we had questions. Why Waymo? What’s the point? What’s the underlying message?

Y Combinator’s Sanjana Friedman, a former Pirate Wires staff writer, thinks burning Waymos is almost ritualistic. The mob didn’t just destroy the cars — it called them to a specific location, lined them up, systematically defaced them, and watched them burn with “gleeful awe.”

“This sounds crazy but in some ways these people are deifying the Waymos — they’re treating them like effigies or totems that need to be sacrificed to appease the mob,” she said in a DM. “The irony is that they’re implicitly recognizing the power of the technology by destroying it in such a deliberate, dogged way — and they’re giving Waymo itself huge name recognition and symbolic power.”

If the general response by the tech industry is any indication (it is), Sanjana is right. The burning Waymo, to them, was like a Bat Signal, and a symbol of all that was impure and unholy about the state of the country. It was an ungrateful rejection of technological progress and its attendant advances in quality of life, little more than a jejune act of ‘resistance’ (with none of the stakes associated with actual ‘resistance’). Among right-leaning tech circles, the impromptu slogan “arm the Waymos” began making the rounds, especially as leftists defended the fires on the (socialist) grounds that property doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. At least, not as much as people carted away by unmarked vans in the night, or so the argument went.

“I think Waymos are just an easy target for a big spectacle. No risk of bodily harm, big corporation behind it. Ideal setup for cosplaying revolutionaries to reveal how they never gave a shit about the environment to begin with,” the tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”) told me over Signal. “But of course it’s dystopian nonetheless. Just wait until they’re fighting the Tesla robots in the streets. Robocop is coming!”

Those things are sure to become walking punching bags, I said.

“Until they start punching back,” DHH replied.

Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, echoed his sentiment.

“It’s simple. Some people understand that they live by the grace and generosity of ancestors that sacrificed to build the great American civilization that we inherited. Some people flippantly disregard that sacrifice and destroy the civilization,” Doricko said in a text. “Frankly, the proponents of civilization shouldn’t flounder and allow the flippant cohort of society to destroy our Waymos, they should do what it takes to defend them, or we’ll die by a thousand cuts.”

ACME cofounder and partner Scott Stanford, who used to lead internet investment banking for Goldman Sachs, saw the burning Waymo as a sign for what’s ahead. A canary in the coal mine, a flirtation with revolution. “The digital and income divide is massive,” Stanford told me.

I can’t help but agree with Stanford. Just look at the visceral divide in sentiment above and below this paragraph.

For activists and intellectuals, Google-owned Waymo, especially on Sunday, became a proxy for the world’s most influential corporations and the man they were in bed with (Trump). For state surveillance. For “extraction.” As the graffiti plastered across the Waymos on Sunday made clear, Waymo wasn’t collateral damage in the riots — it was part of the problem. Waymo meant ICE (“FUCK ICE”), Trump (“FUCK TRUMP!”), tyranny (“when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty”), and injustice (as in “no justice, no peace”). If Waymo was the future, the future wasn’t for them.

In a viral post captioned “All my homies hate Waymo,” the activist Elise Joshi, who attended SF rallies on Monday, said Waymo, which is “devoid of humanity,” is undermining public transit, exacerbating congestion, and contributing to the very undoing of society. Besides making ICE’s job easier, car-centered communities led to the kind of isolation that makes it harder to forge relationships and, by extension, organize against the boss for livable wages.

“Waymos don’t build connection — they maintain existing division. Freedom to move within our cities is not going to come from an app we download or some quick fix that Big Tech sells us. It’ll come from a public good that we fund. We and our communities have been the guinea pigs for technofacism, but we can fight back,” she said. “Abolish Waymo. Abolish ICE.”

SOMETHING ABOUT TYRANNY

You can find an opinion about what the burning Waymos symbolize in every shard of the information economy. But I wanted to know what the rioters on Sunday actually intended to accomplish.

By many accounts, the Waymos were ordered to the riots by people who had the app. Maybe to make a statement. Or maybe because they couldn’t find regular cars to burn. Human drivers had the common sense to avoid downtown LA, as citizen journalist Cam Higby, who was at the scene on Sunday, told us.

“If I’m a logical person driving down the street and I see some terrible shit going on, I’m just going to say, ‘No, not today,’” he said. “A self-driving Waymo doesn’t know that.”

So someone called them to the scene, probably, but who lit the match? And did anyone ask him why? From the available footage, it’s unclear. What I can tell you is that the closer you get to the actual fire, the faster any sense of meaning devolves. It’s just chaos. There were no police in sight. A relative few people were actively participating, and they did so despite responsible adults with megaphones and clipboards begging them not to, according to Higby. Another citizen journalist, Anthony Cabassa, told us he could hear people in the crowd saying “Fuck Waymo,” and that the “rich company” can just file an insurance claim.

In this video, someone hits the Waymo repeatedly with a stick, as a huge plume of smoke rises in the background (another Waymo?), and a lady yells: “TAKE A SHIT IT IN IT!”

In this one, an American flag burns inside the Waymo, while a man, standing on top, addresses cameras: “Waymo is complicit.” In what, it’s not quite clear. Something about tyranny.

And in this one, a man on top of a jacked up Waymo brandishes a sign: “I stand up for all migrants, hard workers, and students who can’t stand out of fear.” So at least that person, presumably, cares about the original reason for the protests. Nice.

Here’s the most illuminating video I could find. You can hear men competing for pictures. (There’s a limited opportunity to stand on the car when it’s on fire before it becomes too on fire to stand on, i.e. “You wasted my one picture!”) One guy, who said he was so close to the fire that it burned the hair off his knuckles, said: “I can easily get 100k likes.”

So what did Waymo mean, at least to some of these folks?

Clout. Clicks. A good photo opp.

(Can we think of an industry that just might be complicit-ish in that behavior?)

For me, the image of the burning Waymo means, simply, chaos. Not just the senseless chaos of the moment, but the chaotic way meaning itself travels through the internet, standing up a fractured ecosystem of influencers, shitposters, and writers like me, who share thoughts to a fractured audience, who share their thoughts to an even more fractured audience, and so on, until we all go to bed — or at least I do — scrolling, feeling confused, wondering if we got it wrong. This is all just reality television now. A challenge of perception. Do your best, just like Waymo’s computer vision, to make out the truth.

— Blake Dodge